


A Few Years Earlier

by heavymoons



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst and Humor, M/M, Pre-Canon, Velvet Room Attendant Persona 5 Protagonist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24821908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavymoons/pseuds/heavymoons
Summary: Akechi wakes up in the Velvet Room. He is angry, directionless, and only sixteen.(AU where Akechi doesn't get the guidance that he needs, but the guidance that he deserves from his blank-faced, socially inappropriate velvet room attendant named Ren. The timeline just might be changed forever.)
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 11
Kudos: 213





	1. Chapter 1

"Welcome to the Velvet Room."

Goro's gaze slowly sweeps across his surroundings; the walls are draped in blue, a deep, mysterious color that matches the same eerie glow that seeps in from beyond the rounded portholes. If he squints, he can make out schools of iridescent fish, shimmering in the distance. The rest of the room is barren, aside from the uncomfortable stiff-backed chair digging into his spine and the long-nosed creature hunched over a mahogany desk with spidery fingers steepled under his chin.

"I am called Igor," the creature, as it could not possibly be human, says in a high and surprisingly feeble voice. "And I'm afraid there has been a mixup."

"A mixup," Goro echoes flatly, finally finding his voice. He takes a breath, schooling the unease away from his features, and tries not to think about the fact that could only have been brought here by unnatural means. "Am I to assume that is why you have kidnapped me to this... _place_?"

Igor's uncanny grin appears to widen and the narrow space reverberates with his high-pitched chuckles. "Kidnapping? Heavens, no. You are here as a most welcomed guest, Akechi Goro. That part is no mistake." 

"Is that so?" Goro asks with biting politeness. He pushes himself to his feet and knocks over his chair for good measure. It hits the ground with a dull, unsatisfying thud. "Then as a guest, you wouldn't mind if I took my leave now, would you?" The threat is empty; as far as he can see, there are no entrances aside from the windows which are both too small for him to squeeze through and are _clearly_ indicating that this whole place is submerged in water. He takes another breath, the leather of his gloves crinkling as his hands curl into fists. He's trapped. He's— 

"Ah, but you are not really here," Igor cuts in.

At Goro's look of blank confusion, he slowly deigns to explain. "You see... this room exists between dreams and reality. Between mind and matter. Your body in reality is in fact, fast asleep." 

" _Asleep_ ," Goro repeats, both incredulous and furious with himself for nearly losing his composure. "Then what exactly is this 'mixup'?"

"Only those who have signed a contract can enter this place," Igor continues on, seemingly unperturbed by his clear hostility. "You were invited here because the strings of fate around you have been twisted by outside forces and threaten to unravel your strand of destiny entirely. As you embark on your journey, we, the inhabitants of the Velvet Room will offer you our services. Unfortunately..." 

To Goro's shock, the long-nosed man _sighs_ , a disconcertingly human sound that seems entirely at odds with his earlier mystique. He even lifts a hand to pinch along the bridge of his monstrously long nose. 

"Unfortunately," he repeats, "as I said, there has been a mixup. _Lavenza_ was meant to be your attendant but she is currently otherwise occupied. Hence..." 

A door that hadn't existed before swings open behind him and from out of it steps a pale, unnaturally beautiful youth — gold irises framed with long lashes, a head of messy white-blond curls — dressed in the same deep shade of blue that everything else is submerged in.

"This is… Victor," Igor continues with another strangely alarming sigh. "My apologies, but he will be looking after you during your stay with us."

The unease that Goro had swallowed immediately rises back up to the surface as he turns to regard his new supposed attendant.

"It is a pleasure to meet you," the newcomer says with a bow. His voice is soft and gentle and not at all unpleasant to the ears, certainly not enough to indicate why he merited two whole _unfortunately_ 's as part of his introduction. "I am Victor. But you may call me Ren for short."

"Right," Goro says, lacking the inclination or the will to engage in the mental gymnastics necessary to parse how 'Victor' could possibly be shortened to 'Ren'. He has far more important things to contend with like when the _fuck_ did he sign a contract, or exactly what kind of designs did fate have on him — but before he can give voice any of his troubles, his next step forward lands on nothing but air. 

_Well now, it appears that our time is up._

Igor's voice rings out from above him as he falls, deeper and deeper, his outstretched hands grasping at the nothingness that swallows up his voice.

_We look forward to your next visit, my dear young man._

Goro awakens, the sensation of drowning so vivid in his mind that he doubles over, coughing to expel the imagined water in his lungs. His ears are still ringing but this time with the shrill screech of his alarm. Groaning, he kicks away the threadbare sheets twisted around his legs and blindly reaches for his phone while wishing he had opted for a cheaper clock instead. Or just something he would feel less guilty about dashing against the wall.

It was just a dream, he tells himself as he stares up at the patch of mildew on his ceiling. An unusually fanciful nightmare resulting from too much expired bread and late-night Featherman reruns. 

In any case, judging by the incessant buzz of his phone despite his best efforts to asphyxiate it with his pillow, it is high time that he dragged his sorry carcass out of bed in the name of making himself decent. So he does, grimacing the entire time at the coldness of the floor tiles, the ratty tangles in his hair, the chalky flavor of cheap toothpaste. Eventually, after nearly dropping his contacts and banging his elbow against the sink, his reflection smiles back at him with impeccably white teeth and neat, caramel locks that fell just below his ears. The perfect image of a smart, upstanding sixteen-year-old son that any estranged father should have been _grateful_ to claim.

It wouldn't do to show up to his appointment without his best face on, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

Goro's bedroom is small; there is only room for a writing desk, a chair, and a small bed. At the foot of it, his clothes are neatly packed away in a small stack of plastic organizers that he had gotten on sale.

He does not have many belongings but they are currently all strewn across the floor. The chair is lying on its side, missing a leg from where he had smashed it into the wall. His clothes are arrayed next to his school supplies, spreading across the floor like a dark stain against the grey tiles.

He is seething, angrier than he ever has been in his life. His rage chokes him, a blinding inferno that threatens to rupture from his organs and consume everything else in its path. And he would let it; if he had the power, he would reach inside his chest and claw open the cage that traps those flames inside and unleash them upon the world.

The words echo in his ears, like a drill puncturing holes through his skull, boring into his brain until it leaks out from his ears.

_Shido-sama is simply too busy to meet with the likes of_ **_you_ **

He was a fool.

A fool that had given into a moment of weakness and allowed himself to _hope_.

Now, all that is left of him is impotent rage and only inanimate furniture to direct it at. After he tears his last notebook to shreds, the last of his energy is spent and his tears no longer fall, he kicks aside some of the mess so he would have a place to collapse onto. And he does, sinking to the floor by the foot of his bed and hugs his knees to his chest.

He stays like that, his face hidden in his arms. 

  
  


The next time Goro opens his eyes, it is to a blue ceiling covered in idyllic ripples of reflected light, crisscrossing like chained links of gold. He stares for what might count as an eternity, in this place where time is meaningless. 

Eventually, he pulls his gaze away from the ceiling and directs it down to the rest of the room. He is lying down on a bench — just as hard and uncomfortable as the chair he had found himself in last time. It isn't the only thing that has changed.

The long-nosed man, Igor, is missing and Goro feels an irrational surge of jealousy that the other could apparently come and go as he wished. Only the attendant, the beautiful doll-like youth named Victor or Ren or whatever, is present. Standing with his arms folded neatly behind his back and gazing out into the darkness lying just beyond the glass.

Goro carefully pushes himself into a sitting position. The floor beneath his feet _feels_ solid but he remains seated, unwilling to fall for yet another deception. He reaches for his reserve of anger but finds it empty; a hollowed-out space in his chest where something had burned. But part of him knows this emptiness is temporary, that it is only a matter of time before another spark will set everything ablaze. He owes that much to himself, to his dead mother, and to _Shido_. The problem of ' _how'_ can be figured out later. 

For now, he sits with his hands laced, his back straight as he observes the other occupant. The so-called attendant of this strange place.

Finally noticing his glare, Victor-Ren turns, meeting it with inhumanly gold eyes. "Welcome back to the Velvet Room," he says in his soft, almost musical voice. "It is good to see you again, dear guest."

"If only I could say the same," Goro says sweetly, with poison in his honeyed voice and knives in his smile. They should be enough to hide how much the flickering shadows unsettle him, how the walls seem to close in on him with claustrophobic intent. How the turbulent shifting of the floor makes him want to puke. "I would, however, like to know _why_ you saw fit to summon me here again."

If the attendant is offended, it does not show on his face. Nothing seems to, in fact. If eyes were meant to be a window to one's soul, Ren's would be a mirror, an opaque golden surface reflecting his own face back to him. He shakes his head in denial, white curls bouncing from the motion. "You were not summoned," he says. "An invitation was extended but it was your hand that accepted it. So I must return your question with one of my own: why have you come here tonight?"

Goro bites down, his molars grinding in a way that would alarm a dentist. But it stops him from lunging across the room in an ill-advised fit of rage. "I want _answers_ ," he grits out, reminding himself of that fact and how counterproductive it would be to antagonize the only one around to give them. "What exactly is this place? What 'journey' am I supposed to be going on?!" Against his best attempts to project calm, his voice pitches at the end — at the ludicrous idea that he would ever move forward again, that his life would ever go anywhere else but down, dragged down, far below the waves.

For a moment, Ren remains silent after his outburst, like a charmed doll whose enchantment has run out. Then, something in his features flickers, a sudden crack in his mask. His lips part, opening to respond but his words are lost, drowned out by a terrible noise, blasting through the walls like a foghorn. 

The bench falls away beneath it and he goes down with it, a hand outstretched towards nothing, towards those all-encompassing gold eyes.

_Your journey will be difficult_ , a voice whispers in his ear, so emotional — pained — in a way that he can't place, can't understand. _But this time, I will be with you._

Goro wakes up gasping, clutching his chest. Sitting by himself in the aftermath of his destructive rage.

But for the first time in his life, he doesn't feel like he is alone.

* * *

_... thou hast acquired a new vow..._

_... and it shall become the wings of thy rebellion ..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is unedited/unbeta'd... sorry :,,)


	3. Chapter 3

Goro doesn't know where he is.

Only that he has been running for a very, very long time.

His breath feels ruptured glass, every inhalation accompanied by the sting of daggers piercing his lungs. His legs protest with every step but he pushes through the fire because the moment he stops running, he will die.

Drawn, quartered, stabbed, cut, burned, eviscerated — his body will be left to bleed out over the carpet. Then, someone will find his decomposing corpse a distasteful addition to the gold-trimmed decor and toss it into the sea. 

He will disappear — fade, vanish, expire — and become even more of the nothing that he is. No one will remember him, the orphan boy, the unwanted, the abandoned. 

But the next hallway that he turns into is not a hallway.

A dead end for a dead boy.

He turns, his back pressed to the wall, his heart pressed to his throat as he glares up at the massive, lumbering creature dragging its too long limbs across the carpet. 

Goro doesn't know where he is, only that this must be hell, a monstrous place filled with denizens that can only be the product of the most twisted of minds. 

He doesn't know where he is, only that he is trapped like a rat — _was_ _literally_ a _rat just minutes ago_ — and there is nowhere left to run.

His arm hurts — more specifically, there is pain emanating from the three long, wicked grooves carved there. But it is his pride that hurts the most.

_Why, why, why, why, why_.

Why did he end up here? Why must he suffer this pain, these indignities? _Why —_ couldn't his _mother_ _have stayed his mother_ —? 

The creature straightens, sightless eyes staring out from a blank, inhuman mask as its chest rumbles with something that he recognizes, with belated horror, is laughter. Then it rears back — spilling out in a flood of red and black ichor as it gives up masquerading as anything resembling human. Still shrieking with that same terrible laughter, springs forwards, neck elongating and claws outstretched.

  
  


This is how it will happen: 

  
  


Something that is pushed will bend and bend but once it is bent too far, when its elasticity fails, there is but one conclusion — it breaks. And so that is what Goro does. The dam inside his mind, the part that speaks to him in whispers of _restraint_ , of _shame, the one that explains to him just why he is so unworthy_ in a voice that sounds just like his own — shatters.

Splinters.

Falling to his feet in a dizzying rush of blue flame that burns all the way down, trailing from his eyes like long tracks of bloody tears, dripping down his chin to pool into the ground. And in that rush, that maelstrom of violence and madness and unbridled _freedom_ , he finally knows that this is exactly where he belongs.

Like the creature, he, too, sheds his thin veneer of humanity, embracing chaos as his dearest and only companion — with eyes the color of blood, claws instead of hands — as he rips, tears, shreds, _slaughters_ his way through, laughing until he can't breathe (or maybe he was screaming) while the malevolent entity within his soul whispers its name into his ears.

  
  


But this is what _actually_ happens:

  
  


Something that is pushed will bend and bend but once it is bent too far, when its elasticity fails, there is but one conclusion — it breaks. But Goro does not because a voice — full of fury and _desperation_ — rings out:

**"Eigaon!"**

And the creature shrieks — writhes in horrified agony as its body is engulfed by a wave of the deepest darkness. It stumbles, claws still stretched out towards him, letting out a low, mournful warble (that sounds so disturbingly _human_ ), and then it pitches forward.

It falls, hitting the carpet soundlessly as if it had no more mass than the shadows crawling along the wall. Parts of its grotesque body scatters away, lifting off like flecks of dark paint and fades into the air. 

But Goro is too busy staring beyond it to notice or care.

At the end of the hallway, stands a demon — a creature wreathed in crimson with a grinning face made of living flame and feathered wings the color of the darkest night, thrumming with magnificence and power that makes his soul _stir_ — and standing in front of it, is Ren.

Perhaps it is a trick of the light; the interplay of shadows cast by the receding blue flames, but his eyes — _an opaque golden surface, reflecting nothing and everything_ — seem to be glowing with an unnameable emotion. But whatever he saw is gone with a blink and the attendant of the Velvet Room looks just as he had in his dreams.

Despite the very real pain pulsing in his arm, Goro wonders if he is, in fact, actually dreaming. While they say that it is not possible to feel pain or die in a dream, it could very well be that they simply do not remember. 

There is no objective evidence to disprove the fact that perhaps Goro could have died any multitudes of deaths while lying fast asleep. Perhaps his subconscious has been experiencing it in his waking self's stead, paying for the sins of his choices over and over — for every time he forces his spine to curve into a bow, every time he wears a smile that he does not mean. Perhaps, this is merely another one of thousands of deaths. A slow erosion of his self, chipped away piece by piece, flaking away like ash.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all.

The demon fades away with a laugh and a faint rattling of chains, drawn back into a massive tome that Ren tucks under an arm with a flourish. "Looks like I made it in time," the attendant says faintly, but Goro thinks the words are not for him — his gaze is distracted, unfocused, lips parting more in an afterthought than deliberate speech. And then he turns towards him, with eyes that had no business, no _right_ , to gaze upon him so softly. "Are you all right?"

"I'm _fine_." The reply is immediate, a hiss snapping through the air like the crack of a whip, sharp with loathing and accusation that is nearly all self-directed. He straightens, ignoring the pulses of pain in his arm and purges the fear from his lungs in a huff of air. In the end, Goro decides that this must _not_ be a dream, solely on the grounds that he refuses to have a subconscious hateful enough to imagine into being a _savior_ , let alone one that looks like he had never encountered a comb in his life. 

"So," he continues, in a tone that is only mildly less acerbic, the barbs on his tongue aimed to wound instead of to kill, "is there a reason you've decided on this lovely change in decor? While I don't mind the extra legroom, the _hospitality_ here leaves much to be desired."

When Ren only blinks in reply, head tilted in bewilderment — _looking so unaffected, so untouched by the depth of swirling emotion gnawing at his core, thehurtfeardespair_ — that he finally snaps. Goro lunges forwards, hands closing around the high collar of Ren's gold-embroidered blue shirt and slams him into the wall. 

" _Answer me,_ " he screams through the choking inferno in his chest, hands clenching, bunching tightly in the pressed fabric like he could wring what he needed from him through brute force alone. "Why me? Why is it me?! What did I ever do to deserve any of this—?!"

It is then that Goro makes the mistake of looking into his eyes. What he sees in them stops him in his tracks and steals away his breath. 

What he had thought was indifference is serenity, a gentle calm that sees all the ugliness inside him — _his crumbling soul, a patchwork of bleeding masks, the hatred that threatens to burn, to consume_ — and accepts it all inside him. Without judgment, without distaste, but with a quiet warmth that leeches away his fury as quickly as it had come.

The connection only lasts a moment but it is the attendant who breaks it, averting his gaze further down the hallway and leaving Goro off-balance and unsettled. "...it's not safe here," he says, instead. His words prove true when Goro hears the sounds, the unnatural scrape of footsteps echoing from further down the corridors. 

  
Goro lets him go without another word, falling into step behind him. 

**Author's Note:**

> (sorry this isn't my main project but will try to post things when the inspiration hits :,3c)


End file.
